Osbie Feel

A Pynchon List thread:

Jorn Barger wrote:

Who wrote Gravity's Rainbow, *among its characters*?

Oedipa could easily have written Lot 49, and Zoyd is very likely to blame for the laziness and self-pity of Vineland. But there ain't no way Tyrone ever managed GR! He just didn't *think* enough...

Would any of its characters have been equal to the task?

Andrew Dinn replied:

This one is so obvious. It's the hidden cameraman whose use of controlled substances seems to deny the very possibility of control, whose address straight to camera and to Pirate is also straight to the readers' paranoid mind, who is already expecting Roger, Katje and The Eagle of Tooting when they come to sign up for The Counterforce (how do I find that dotted line?), whose mentor, Dumbo, carries a white feather enabling him to *defy gravity*.

Osbie Feel, of course.

Note also that Osbie was the one found sitting at that desk with the copy of An Introduction to Modern Herero and other Pynchonesque paraphernalia, — Prospero, master of his poor cell, anyone?

P 536:
"He leads her to a back room fitted out with telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories, spools of recording wire. 'Not very organized around here yet. But it's coming along, love, it's coming.'"